Learn how to communicate more effectively at work and achieve your goals. Taught by award-winning Wharton professor and best-selling author Maurice Schweitzer, Improving Communications Skills is an essential course designed to give you both the tools you need to improve your communication skills, and the most successful strategies for using them to your advantage. You'll learn how to discover if someone is lying (and how to react if they are), how to develop trust, the best method of communication for negotiation, and how to apologize. You'll also learn when to cooperate and when to compete, how to create persuasive messages, ask thoughtful questions, engage in active listening, and choose the right medium (face-to-face conversation, video conference, phone call, or email) for your messages. By the end of the course, you'll be able to understand what others want, respond strategically to their wants and needs, craft convincing and clear messages, and develop the critical communication skills you need to get ahead in business and in life.

OW

I did really enjoy the course. I gave a different perspective on situations and personal behaviour. The approach was very effective and the knowledge sticks in your mind. Very good.

AP

May 15, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Professor Maurice Schweitzer is obviously an expert in this field, and it was great to be able to learn from him. Course was very useful and thoughtfully presented.\n\nThank you!

From the lesson

Trust

In this module, you'll explore how to gain and built trust to develop cooperation, and understand why this critical step can be so challenging. You'll examine the factors that develop a trusting relationship: demonstrating vulnerability, building rapport, and expressing warmth, and learn how to increase trust by uncovering common goals, common enemies, and interdependence. You'll also learn how to communicate with team members, friends, and opponents in a way that encourages trust. By the end of this module, you’ll understand how to build trusting relationships to achieve cooperation and mutual satisfaction.

Taught By

Maurice Schweitzer

Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions

Transcript

I actually want to think about communication and institutions as we build trust. When it comes to communication, one of the key ideas is to make sure our words match our deeds. I want to tell you a story about 2008 when the three big American car manufacturers came to Washington DC asking for federal loans. They were asking for $25 billion in loans, and it came out that all three of them, the three CEOs who came to DC, had all flown on separate corporate jets. Now this is how they usually traveled. It just seemed incongruous to say we desperately need money when they had flown separately on their private jets. And so the next time they came for their second trip, they went in hybrid vehicles. You want to think about how your words match your deeds to affect the most trust. Another key idea about communication is you want to communicate as equals. And by communicating as equals, what that means is that we show up on time. That is, we're not signaling that our time is more important than somebody else's. And we can minimize other differences like in the seating, in the clothing, and so on. So language matters not just in one how we communicate but the terms that we use. There is a study that was done that Varda Liberman did looking at the same economic incentives, but calling it the community game versus the Wall Street game. It turns out with the same incentives, people cooperated far more in the community game than they did in the Wall Street game when they call somebody a partner versus an opponent. When you can an employee a team member versus an employee, you're triggering a different mindset, and that mindset shifts the way we relate to each other. It's not just in language. I talked about deeds before. And then that's manifest in how we sit. So when we're sitting together on the same side of the table, that seating, we're tackling a problem together communicates an idea that we're working together. And that can help build trust. It's not just in communication, only think about institutions. So we can trust other people, but we can also trust institutions like the court system. And the way we trust the court system has profound consequences. We often have this reverence for institutions, but they're not universally shared throughout the world. I'm going to tell you a story about Alton Logan. And I've put up a picture here of Andrew Wilson to suggest that the two of them, and you have to imagine 20 years earlier, they looked pretty similar. It turns out there's a shooting in 1982 in Chicago at a McDonald's. It was a chaotic crime scene, and there was eye witness testimony. And that testimony was enough to convict Alton Logan. There is one problem, Alton Logan wasn't even there. He had nothing to do with that shooting. It was Andrew Wilson. Now making matters worse, lawyers for Andrew Wilson, representing him for another crime, and he had actually committed other murders. Andrew Wilson admitted to his attorneys that he had committed that murder in the McDonald's. Meanwhile, Alton Logan was convicted and remained in prison. The lawyers begged Andrew Wilson to come clean. He was, after all, already convicted of murder. Wouldn't he confess to that crime too? Alton Logan, they knew was wrongfully imprisoned. However, there's a problem. In the United States, we have attorney-client privilege. The attorneys couldn't unilaterally disclose that information, information that would harm their client, information that was disclosed in secret. This principle is important because to get the best representation, we need to ensure that criminals or suspects can disclose information to their lawyers without the fear of having that be used against them. So that's an important principle. And it turns out that principle guided the lawyer's behavior. They actually wrote an affidavit, but they sealed it away. They hide it away, and Alton Logan was in prison for 26 years. It was only after Andrew Wilson died in prison, they came forward and disclosed that information, and Alton Logan finally went free. Here's the most amazing part about the story. His aunt on receiving him said, they did what they had to do, demonstrating an incredible reverence for this institution. Now, I want to think about institutions in other ways, too. And here's a funny institution, it's the institution of gossip. Here was a billboard that was put in front of a church that read, if your friends gossip to you, you know they also gossip about you. Now, we think that gossip gets a bad rap. Gossip, of course, has some very negative characteristics, but it does other things too. It helps us communicate what the norms are, what expected behavior is. It communicates information about reputations. Now gossip isn't a great thing, but it actually helps us police behavior in a more profound way than we typically acknowledge. We've now begun to formalize that with rating systems. So if we're asking this question, would you let a complete stranger sleep in your home? And the answer turns out to be a resounding yes. And we've solved that with rating systems. And if you were to look at Airbnb's website, they have a website devoted to trust. Throughout their materials, they talk consistently about trust. And they find that people are in fact incredibly trustworthy, and the rating system makes a profound difference. And the same is true of other key questions, like would you let your kids drive in a car with someone you don't know? And the answer here again is yes. And Uber's figured this out again with ratings system that help us trust other people. And this is true with Ebay and other electronic commerce sites that have figured out that reputations can be effective in helping us solve the trust problem.

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